Attorney math: 1 day = 26 hours

Municipal lawyer in Columbia County paid by taxpayers for up to 93.75 hours per week

By Jamie Larson

Updated 2:31 pm, Tuesday, November 13, 2012

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Attorney Tal Rappelyea,Steve Jacobs, James Pellitteri, Supervisor Carol Muth, Michael McCrary, William Trach in a photo for the Town of Jewett in Greene County. (Town of Jewett)

Attorney Tal Rappelyea,Steve Jacobs, James Pellitteri, Supervisor Carol Muth, Michael McCrary, William Trach in a photo for the Town of Jewett in Greene County. (Town of Jewett)

Attorney math: 1 day = 26 hours

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KINDERHOOK — Municipal attorney Tal Rappleyea worked long hours for the Columbia County attorney's office and 11 towns he represented in 2010.

In fact, in two cases, Rappleyea was paid for more than 24 hours of labor in a single day.

An investigation into the attorney's 2010 billing invoices, obtained from towns and villages across Columbia and Greene counties, and payment records from his 30-hours-per-week job as an assistant Columbia County attorney revealed that Rappleyea was often paid for working well over 70 hours a week.

During one week in September 2010, he was paid for working 93.75 hours.

On June 14, 2010, the documents show, Rappleyea was paid for working 24.75 hours in a single day. Later, on Sept. 28, 2010, he was paid for working 26 hours, between his 12 government clients. Rappleyea was paid for working more than 18 hours in one day on 28 separate occasions that year.

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The municipalities included in the investigation were the towns of Austerlitz, Ashland, Cairo, Chatham, Durham, Greenville, Jewett, Lexington, Stuyvesant and Prattsville, and the village of Athens. Rappleyea is still an attorney for all of these towns and now also works as an attorney for Germantown. In January, he resigned from his position in the Columbia County attorney's office after eight years at the post. Rappleyea's work there was primarily focused on real estate and foreclosure proceedings. He said he left the county office because his work for towns was taking up increasing amounts of his time.

Recently shown a spreadsheet analysis of his billing, Rappleyea said that not only did he work the hours for which he was paid but he also occasionally worked additional time for free. In response to questions about workdays over 24 hours, he explained that while his time sheets report that he was paid for six hours each day by Columbia County, he normally worked his assigned 30 hours a week on Tuesdays, Thursdays and over weekends.

Asked how it's possible to work over 80 hours a week and not collapse from exhaustion, Rappleyea said, "I'm in pretty good shape."

He added that if he had a particularly long week he tried to take it easy the next few days. However, following his 93.25-hour week, he was paid for 78.25 hours and 74.5 hours the next two weeks.

"The hours are what they are," the attorney said, sitting in his Kinderhook office surrounded by invoices, often referring to daily totals on a handwritten pencil ledger, which contained numbers that did not coincide with the findings of the investigation. "When I submit (bills) to a town they go by at least six eyes. Their budgets are tight. If there's something they think I didn't do they'll tell me."

Rappleyea's hourly bills have become available on the Internet in recent years through scrutiny by Stuyvesant resident and blogger Will Pflaum. Pflaum spent nearly two years filing Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests and suing to obtain the public records analyzed and verified for this investigation.

"I worked all these hours." Rappleyea said. "Yeah, I'm a workaholic. My wife and I talk about it all the time."

During his eight years as an assistant county attorney, Rappleyea earned credits in the New York State pension system. Pflaum asserts that Rappleyea's records suggest the lawyer was overbilling individual towns he worked for and additionally, not working the hours for Columbia County that were reported to the state. Rappleyea's attorney, John Bailey of Albany, disputed Pflaum's claim. "Tal Rappleyea works very hard, provides excellent legal representation and earns everything he is paid," Bailey said.

Throughout the beginning of 2012 Pflaum contacted numerous county officials to alert them to what he believed was going on. He met with Columbia County District Attorney Paul Czajka, had an email exchange with current Columbia County Board of Supervisors ChairmanPatrick Grattan, and confronted head County Attorney Robert Fitzsimmons in his Hudson office with a video camera. Pflaum's aggressive tone and approach has made him unpopular but he says officials are ignoring their obligation to investigate Rappleyea's billing practices.

Grattan would not return repeated requests for comment on this matter, but DA Czajka did respond briefly, saying only: "I can neither confirm or deny if I am conducting an investigation."

Fitzsimmons confirmed that Rappleyea usually worked Tuesdays, Thursdays and weekends for the county. He said work time was recorded as six hours a day for the sake of pension paperwork sent to the New York State Comptroller's Office but as long as attorneys got their weekly assignments done they could work 30 hours whenever they chose.

"For the pension reporting service the computer put in six hours a day," Fitzsimmons said. "(Rappleyea) had the obligation to put in 30 hours a week. We didn't have a paper document but we kept a pulse on what was going on."

Fitzsimmons said the office employed a "two-sets-of-eyes approach," where at least one attorney in the county office was aware of what another attorney was working on.

"At the county level he did what he needed to do," Fitzsimmons said of Rappleyea. "He got the work done."

According to the county attorney, an online log system was implemented in January of this year, on advice from the Comptroller's Office.

Asked to comment on Rappleyea's billing, a spokesman for the Comptrollers office replied: "Our office is aware of the situation and it is under review."

Fitzsimmons was asked if, as a county and municipal attorney himself, he felt working a 90-hour-plus week seemed plausible or even possible. "If you're willing to put in 90 hours, so be it," he responded, "I used to tell (Rappleyea), 'I don't know how you do so much but more power to you.'"

The common reaction to the billing analysis, among a number of officials in the towns Rappleyea worked for, was that they could only speak for their own town, Rappleyea got his work done and they never thought they were over-billed.

"I never felt that we didn't get what we paid for," said Chatham Supervisor Jesse DeGroodt. "He's served us well."

In Germantown, however, Supervisor Roy Brown described his relationship with Rappleyea as "OK." Brown was the Columbia County Board of Supervisors chairman during 2010 and when his town board voted to replace their existing legal council with Rappleyea in January 2012, Brown was the only dissenting vote.

The minutes of that meeting read: "Supervisor Brown said he knows (Rappleyea) well from working with him at the county very closely for the last two years, and while he has information he can't share in public, he is very disappointed the board is going in this direction."

In a recent interview, Brown said he was disappointed the board hired Rappleyea without putting out a request for proposal.

"As county chair I was made aware of certain things I can't disclose that bothered me." He said. "Things he had going on in the county."

Asked if the hours shown in the billing analysis concerned him, Brown said he wouldn't comment until he had a chance to speak with Rappleyea.

"Certainly as a supervisor it feels like we're on call 24/7," Brown said. "But billing for those kinds of hours certainly makes you sit up in your chair and take notice."

Jamie Larson is a freelance reporter studying investigative reporting at New York University's journalism graduate school and is a former reporter for the Hudson Register-Star.